Is it because I'm looking from the outside, why is it people are not concerned that they are actually constructing their own prison?, life is always going to be a risk and we should find ways to minimize the risks, but surely there has to be a balance between safety and freedom, I keep thinking of the person who has a dozen locks on their door, and then either a fire starts or a killer shoots through the window, the occupier has no where to run.

Schools in my opinion should be more like prisons. School is not meant to be a social house. You're there to gain knowledge. Something kids don't even care about as much as the socializing these days. My school didn't make me feel trapped. I liked that I felt safe. We didn't have windows, and we had a good fire system and every room had a second or third door for exit from.

I'm not sure about schools being prisons but I saw a Nightline piece a while ago about how so many kids text hundreds of times a day, with many of those texts being done in class. No wonder the output of our schools is so abysmal in terms of academics, by comparison with other countries. I think it's been shown that single-sex schools where the kids wear uniforms and not trendy clothes help keep their minds on academics.

Are you serious about this? If kids don't like going to school in the first place, why would they for whatever reason want to do it in a place that felt like a prison. Mine felt like a prison just because it was against school rules to go to the gate unless you were going home. In a fortified school I wouldn't have gone bonkers

To each their own I suppose....and yes I'm serious. In fact there was a pretty good example of this on my last day of high school back in 2003. Ten minuets before the last bell rang to let us go, my school went on lock down because someone reported that a gun was on campus. We stayed till a false alarm was reported over the intercom. As we later found out, a kid had made a rubber band gun in shop out of wood. He was just collecting it out of his shop locker to take it home. So, someone saw it told the teacher, who told the office. I don't' know what happened other than that but the police were all over the campus when we left our rooms. The point is they got the school in lock down fast and no one was going anywhere unless they wanted you to.

I am old enough to remember when schools never went on lock down (no one even knew what the phrase meant), and we actually walked to school, because there wasn't this insane paranoia about child abductions. (They aren't any more common than they used to be, but now you hear about every one that happens nationwide.)

Don't blame the media. The media watch the viewer statistics like hounds. If people switched their TV's off during this coverage, the coverage would be cut way back.

Personally, after the first day I reacquainted myself with Pandora, even though I normally am a guy who works with CNN running. When there are more people like me, they'll stop covering it so much, but not before.